Investments in young companies have fallen, with 2,215 start-ups raising money in the United States in the last three months of 2019, the fewest since late 2016, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook, which track start-ups. SoftBank bet big on companies like Uber and WeWork, as well as the Colombian delivery start-up Rappi and the Indian hospitality start-up Oyo. Read More: nytimes.com
At a public meeting today, the The Federal Communications Commission said the country’s top cell phone carriers – AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile – would be fined $200 million after officials found they were selling customer’s real-time location data. She said the FCC kept consumers in the dark for nearly two years after the agency learned that wireless carriers were still selling location data. Read More: marketplace.org
More than 500 companies participated in the 2019 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks survey, ranging from pre-revenue to $150M+ ARR publicly traded SaaS companies. In reality, very few public SaaS companies support their growth with high burn – in fact just 7 public SaaS companies will generate substantial negative profit margins this year. Read More: openviewpartners.com
9 in 10 B2B and B2C subscription businesses put customer retention at a higher or equal level of priority than they do customer acquisition, per a report from Brightback. The focus on customer retention is especially true for B2B subscription businesses, where 90% say that retention is one of their top 3 priorities when it comes to subscriber growth this year, ahead of expansion, acquisition and onboarding. Read More: marketingcharts.com
Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested. After the company realized I was asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by Clearview’s systems and for a while showed no matches. Read More: www.nytimes.com